September | 2013 | Orlando Lean Coffee

Some topics and summaries from this week:

What is the “best” of the Agile Lifecycle Management (ALM) Tools – short answer “it depends on your team and your product”. Forrester just came out with their report on ALM tools and includes tools like Rally, IBM, Atlassian (Greenhopper, now called Jira Agile) and others. Those are all great tools, but may not always be best for you. Some great tools for small teams that we discussed (and some of us are using) where LeanKit and Scrumy. Keep in mind, that if you are going to scale, Rally and VersionOne have free 10-user versions. For Jira Agile, you can get a 30-day free trial (first for Jira and then adding the Jira Agile plug-in). Best to figure out your agile process first before you jump into a tool unless you have immediate needs to keep distributed team members or stakeholders in sync.
When Does GUI Design Get Accomplished? short answer – all the time. We talked about rolling wave planning, progressive elaboration, visioning, epics and user stories. Much of this is covered in Mike Cohn’s books and website
How to estimate requirements design effort? Again, see Mike Cohn’s work.
What was your agile “aha” moment? This was a great way to get to know more about the folks who gathered with us this morning. It was funny that it was voted a low priority, but folks wanted to finish with this rather than take on another topic that tied with it.

Topics we didn’t get to or talked about briefly:

Starter Studio – awesome new startup incubator in Orlando started by Gregg Pollack of Envy Labs. Mark is an agile mentor there.
Agile outside of software development – folks might be interested in the Agile for non-software LinkedIn group
What is hot in Agile? See Mark’s post on Agile2013
What is Agile Orlando doing next? See AgileOrlando.com Events and Discussions
How does an independent get started in Agile (job placement?)?

Orlando Lean Coffee